Except for a major surprise, Kyriakos Mitsotakis will continue to lead Greece for another four years, even if he has to wait until July to do so, when everything indicates that the new call for elections will take place if he rules out an improbable coalition government with the Pasok socialists. Aged 55 and graduated from the prestigious American Harvard University, Mitsotakis belongs to one of the great families of Hellenic politics.
His late father, Konstantinos, was head of government from 1990 to 1993, while his sister, Dora Bakoyanni, served as foreign affairs minister and mayor of Athens, a position now held by her nephew. After developing a good part of his professional career abroad, he became interested in politics upon his return to Greece and managed to lead the Administrative Reform portfolio between 2013 and 2015, a time in which he strove to apply tax cuts for the ‘troika’.
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A year later, he won the primaries of New Democracy, the main center-right party in the country, and began to wear down the opposition to the left-wing government then led by Alexis Tsipras until defeating him in the 2019 elections. Unlike him, the The new ruler recovered the tradition of taking the oath of office with his hand on the Bible and in the presence of the Archbishop of Athens and the representatives of the Orthodox Church.
In these four years at the head of the Executive, Mitsotakis has convinced a good part of the Greeks that he embodies the best option to relaunch the country after the decade lost due to the crisis. According to a recent survey, 49% of citizens consider the conservative leader as the most capable to head the next cabinet, while only 25% trust his main rival, Tsipras, leader of the leftist Syriza party.
«Mitsotakis has had a strange legislature in which, when we began to recover after the harsh period of austerity due to the crisis, Covid-19 appeared and then, inflation due to the war in Ukraine. The prime minister managed the pandemic smartly, helping companies not to lay off workers, and also giving citizens subsidies to mitigate the effect of inflation. Let’s hope that we are at the end of the tunnel of rising prices,” explains political analyst Yannis Koutsomitis.
Beyond tourism
Among the tasks that the leader of New Democracy will have to carry out if, as expected, he obtains an absolute majority in the July elections or leads a coalition Executive, the relaunch of the Hellenic economy beyond the success of the tourism sector stands out. “The country has yet to unleash its full potential,” says columnist Alexis Papachelas in the daily ‘Kathimerini’, the country’s most important.
Koutsomitis, for his part, points out the importance of modernizing the infrastructure to overcome the neglect of recent decades, responsible in part for the rail accident that left 57 dead last February.
“It will also have to make agriculture more competitive and facilitate the development of new technologies. And let’s hope that from the end of next year the Greek banks will begin to overcome the European restrictions to finance the private sector as needed,” concludes Koutsomitis, who also applauds Mitsotakis’ firm support for Ukraine despite the “close historical ties » between Greece and Russia.
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